Collaboration strategist Knight leaves for SaaS e-mail security company
As Cisco is trumpeting the arrival of its Cius collaboration tablet, its collaboration CTO has quietly left the building. David Knight has gone to Proofpoint, a maker of cloud-based e-mail security and compliance products, to be its executive vice president of product management and marketing.
At Cisco, Knight was CTO of the company’s Collaboration Software Group, which just lost its head executive a couple of months ago. Knight was responsible for Cisco collaboration product and technical vision, strategy and management.
Knight’s background is in SaaS product management. Cisco’s own cloud-based e-mail offering, from its PostPath acquisition, failed. But he also cut his teeth at WebEx, a SaaS-based collaborative meeting application that was successful even before Cisco’s $3 billion acquisition of WebEx. Knight joined Cisco with that acquisition. There were, however, rumors that Cisco might do away with WebEx as part of its current product and business rationalization effort.
Knight will play a key role in growing Proofpoint’s SaaS-based e-mail security, compliance and archiving products, the company said.
Previous to WebEx, Knight was vice president of marketing and product management at SaaS pioneer Portera Systems. He also held executive positions at Sybase and Oracle.
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